“Remove your hand and take your odor out of my face.”
“Look at the plane. It’s dipping out of the sky. You have to choose between our families and these worthless people. You worry about my odor? What is wrong with you, man?”
“You are like an empty wagon rattling across a bridge,” Krill said. “You speak craziness and nonsense. You are like the demoniac babbling among the swine. We do not kill children. Have you learned nothing? Do you understand nothing except killing?”
“We did not put the children here. This is not our fault. Lupa and Mimo and me will do everything that is necessary inside the house. You will not have to see or hear anything that happens down there. One day you will be right in the head, but now you are not. So we will do these things for you and forget the bad words that you have spoken.”
“You will do nothing without my permission.”
“Take the shot, Krill. Please. You can do it. I’ve seen you shoot the head off a dove at a hundred meters. Concentrate on the Russian and don’t worry about the children. They will be all right. But we cannot leave this man alive.”
Krill’s head was pounding, his ears filled with whirring sounds that were louder than either the wind or Negrito’s incessant talking. Had it been like this for the soldiers in the helicopter who had machine-gunned the clinic built by the East Germans? Had they seen Krill’s children playing in the yard and wondered if they should not abort their mission? Had they fired on the building in hopes that they would not hit the children? Or had they given no thought at all to what they were doing? Did they simply murder his children and fly back to their base and eat lunch and drink warm beer under a palm-shaded table, staring idly at a smokeless blue volcano in the distance? Was that what happened when they slew the innocent children he had loved from the first breath they had drawn?
He bent over the rifle again, feeling the sling tighten on his left arm, his mouth filled with a taste like pennies, a brass band thundering in his head. The little boy was seated firmly in Sholokoff’s lap, watching the television. Krill raised the rifle barrel until the hood on the front sight circled Sholokoff’s head like the frame on a miniature photograph. He took a breath and waited a split second and then exhaled slowly, slowly, slowly, his left eye squinted shut, his right eye bulging like a child’s marble, his index finger tightening as though it had a life of its own.
Suddenly, he stood erect, pulling his hand from the trigger guard as though it had been shocked with a cattle prod. His teeth were chattering, his breath catching in his throat. Murderer, he thought he heard a voice say. Assassin! Man who brought death to his own children . He stared wide-eyed at Negrito.
“You look sick, cabron. You look like your mind has flown into the darkness,” Negrito said.
“We go back through the grass and out the fence,” Krill said. “We are through with this. We will deal with Sholokoff at another time.”
“I cannot believe what you are doing,” Negrito said. “You’re letting us down, man. You are making a great mistake that each of us will pay for. It ain’t fair. You are betraying us, Krill.”
Krill was already walking deep into the mountain’s shadow, his M16 reslung on his shoulder, his eyes empty, like those of a man who has looked into a mirror and is unable to recognize the image staring back at him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hackberry Holland did not learn of the killings near the Santiago Mountains from another law enforcement agency, because they were not reported the night they occurred or the following morning, either. He learned of them from a questionable source, one in whom he had already induced a sizable dose of paranoia. In fact, he had a hard time concentrating on the telephone conversation. It was raining, and he had forgotten to take down the flag outside his office window. The flag, soggy as a towel, hung twisted and forlorn against a gray sky, its chain vibrating against the pole like a damaged nerve. “Mr. Dowling, I’ve heard nothing about a shooting in this county or anywhere around here,” he said. “It’s been surprisingly quiet.”
“Of course you didn’t. Josef doesn’t want cops crawling all over his property,” Temple Dowling replied.
“You say two men were killed?”
“Right. Two security guys. Somebody cut their noses out of their faces.”
“Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? I mean, why is it you know about this but nobody else does?”
“Because maybe I got one or two people inside Josef’s organization.”
“What do you want me to do about this unreported homicide that only you seem to know about?”
“Go out to the game ranch. Investigate the crime. Stuff a hand grenade up his ass. What do I care? Why not just do your fucking job?”
“Because somehow you’re at risk?”
“Josef believes I put a hit on him.”
“Listen to what you’re saying, Mr. Dowling. Two guys got killed outside Sholokoff’s house, but no attempt was made to harm anybody inside the house. Does that seem like a rational scenario to you?”
“That’s because a bunch of hunters had just flown in. Look, my source says Josef went apeshit. He had his grandchildren in the house.” There was a pause. “His guys are coming after me.”
Hackberry could hear the tremor in Dowling’s voice, the frightened boy no longer able to hide behind arrogance and cruelty. “First, you have your own security service, Mr. Dowling. Why not make use of it? If a crime occurred in the place you describe, it’s out of my jurisdiction. Second, maybe it’s time for you to grow up.”
“Time for me to-”
“Everybody dies. Why not go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing? You’ve probably made millions profiteering off of war. Get a taste of the real deal and scorch your name on the wall before you check out. It’s not a bad way to go.”
“You’re a son of a bitch.”
Hackberry rubbed his forehead and started to hang up, then placed the receiver against his ear again. “If you think you’re in danger, get out of town.”
“I’m already out of town. It doesn’t matter. Sholokoff has a network all over the country.”
“I think you’re imagining things.”
“You don’t understand Josef. He doesn’t just do evil. He loves it. That’s the difference between him and the rest of us. Jack Collins is probably a lunatic. Josef isn’t. He creates object lessons nobody ever forgets. He has people taken apart.”
“He does what?”
Perhaps due to his fundamentalist upbringing, R. C. Bevins was not a believer in either luck or coincidence but saw every event in his life as one that required attention. The consequence was that he never dismissed any form of human behavior as implausible and never thought of bizarre events in terms of their improbability. The sheriff had once told R.C. that if a UFO landed on the prairie, two things were guaranteed to happen: Everyone who witnessed the landing would grab his cell phone to dial 911, and R.C. would knock on the spaceship door and introduce himself.
R.C. had pulled into a convenience store and gas station on a county road just south of the east-west four- lane that paralleled the Mexican border, and had gone inside and bought a chili dog and a load of nachos and jalapeno peppers and a Dr Pepper and had just started eating lunch at a table by the front window when he saw a pickup stop and let out a passenger. The passenger limped slightly, as though he had a stitch in his side. He wore shades and an unlacquered wide-brim straw hat, like one a gardener might wear. His nose was a giant teardrop, his jeans hiked up too high on his hips, his suspenders notched into his shoulders, the way a much older man might wear them. The man went into the back of the store and took a bottle of orange juice and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler and a package of Ding Dongs from the counter. He paid, sat down, and began eating at a table not far from R.C.’s, never removing his shades. R.C. nodded at him, but the man did not look up from his food.
“Bet you could fry an egg out there,” R.C. said.
“That about says it,” the man replied, chewing slowly, his mouth closed, his gaze seemingly fixed on nothing.
“My uncle says that during the drought of 1953, it got so dry here he saw a catfish walking down a dirt road
